The Toa Mata Band is an ingenious ensemble of toy robots playing drum machines, a stylophone, and a Kaossilator, all controlled by an iPad sequencer via an Arduino interface:

Opening Reception for THIS IS HOW MY BRAIN WORKS

Friday, September 7, 2012

I’m excited to be a part of THIS IS HOW MY BRAIN WORKS, at Radiator Gallery in Long Island City, Queens. The show, curated by Michael Lee, examines the contemporary practice of collage through its many iterations and permutations — ranging from works on paper to artist books, photographs, sculpture, textiles, and digital projections.

THIS IS HOW MY BRAIN WORKS features a variety of new collage projects, including my piece, SLOTS — a site-specific video installation, projection-mapped on to the stairway at the entrance to the gallery.

SLOTS is built around the metaphor of a slot machine. But I’ve augmented conventional slot machine symbols with iconic images of humanity from across the history of Western art. When the machine produces a winning combination, the “payout” is an interlude featuring one of a series of quotations, examining whether the art world is a set of steps that artists can climb to achieve success and significance, or just a game of chance, in which arbitrary forces hold sway, and everything is rigged.

Other artists featured in the show: Donovan Barrow, Brian Belott, Natasha Bowdoin, Floto+Warner, Sara Klar, Todd Knopke, Michael Lee, Elisa Lendvay, Abraham McNally, Andrew Mount, Ryan Sarah Murphy, Francesca Pastine, Javier Pinon, and Leslie Siegel.

The show runs thru September 30, and can be viewed until then during normal gallery hours (Saturday & Sundays, 12pm-6pm).

DETAILS:

THIS IS HOW MY BRAIN WORKS
Opening Reception
Friday, September 7, 2012
6pm-9pm

Radiator Gallery
10-61 Jackson Ave
(7 train to Vernon-Jackson – 1st stop in Queens)
Long Island City, NY 11106

RSVP on Facebook

For the cover of their issue endorsing Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, the uber-conservative National Review copied a Stalinist propaganda poster:

The groupthink and reality-denial of modern conservatism is increasingly Soviet in character… but this is still mind-boggling.

(Via Balloon Juice.)

I’ve been staring at my monitor for hours on end, as I work on a new projection-mapped video art piece. Here are a few glimpses of what’s filling my field of vision these days.

The piece is called SLOTS, and it debuts on Friday, September 7, at the opening of This Is How My Brain Works.

Burned out on high-definition, high-melodrama coverage of the London Olympics? Here’s a nice lo-fi counterpoint: Lillian Schwartz’s early computer animation OLYMPIAD (1971), with music by Max Mathews.

A few weeks ago I was honored to attend a private screening and celebration honoring Schwartz, a pioneer of digital art that the world knows too little about. She was one of a group of artists working at Bell Labs in the 1960s and 1970s, finding strange and creative uses for cutting-edge technology. (Computer music trailblazer Mathews was also at Bell Labs at the time.)

It was during this period that Schwartz — now 85 — created some of the very first examples of digital animation (including OLYMPIAD, inspired, she said, by Eadweard Muybridge’s human motion studies). At the screening, she told us about her laborious working method: first planning her animations on graph paper, then writing programs to render them, manually creating punch cards to run the programs, and individually photographing each frame of the rendered work off of a monitor.

That evening, we viewed half a dozen of her pieces using ChromaDepth glasses, which add dimension to flat color images via prismatic lenses. (This wasn’t something that Schwartz planned when she first created her films, but an effect she discovered years later.)

Newly restored versions of many of Lillian Schwartz’s most important works will be screening at MoMA on December 10. Meanwhile, you can find a number of her pieces on her YouTube channel.

This subversion of a subway advertisement for an Adam Sandler movie made the rounds of the internets last week. Now Hyperallergic has tracked down and interviewed its perpetrator, Jilly Ballistic.

Designer Matthew Plummer-Fernandez created a sound whose waveform, plotted over time, looked like a chair. Then he had it made into an actual chair.

(Via The New Aesthetic)

This is a real QR code, enhanced with an image of a zebra’s eye, that was featured in a magazine ad I saw recently. You can verify that this code works by scanning it with a mobile app like i-nigma, or by pasting the URL of the photo above into this form. (It doesn’t take you anywhere interesting — just to a site about Intel laptops.)

Until I saw this image, I didn’t realize that it is in fact possible to embed images in working QR codes. Here’s how to do it.

UPDATE: The Politics of Time, Kyle Trowbridge’s collection of massive, colorful, and fully functional QR code paintings, is now on show at Dorsch Gallery in Miami. (Hat tip to Kathleen Hudspeth.)